Professional Enlightenment

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Steve Gregg
  • 56th Rescue Squadron commander
ROYAL AIR FORCE LAKENHEATH, England --  Professional enlightenment occurs when our education and experiences allow us to distill wisdom from what often appear as disparate bodies of knowledge. Yet, even at this most crucial nexus our own perceptions and misperceptions, even our human nature, can fail us.

John Nance, in Why Hospitals Should Fly, outlines such a case by employing widely accepted aviation standardization and discipline measures across the multiple disciplines of medicine. His fundamental argument, however, has a broader application: from tactical, daily operations such as processing the multitudes of data in a personnel flight to strategic, complex problems such as purchasing the next generation of air and space vehicles.

Achieving procedural excellence requires, I believe, at least three elements. First, our organizations must possess or develop the intellectual capital to effectively use historical analogies from similar data sets or contemporary analogies from different professional fields. By its very nature, developing this capital should not occur rapidly. Indeed, a career-long journey of study and development resulting in deep and broad experience is a deliberate and challenging proposition. Achieving this goal requires we learn our trade passionately and engage every opportunity to explore different cultures and tribes. Formal education is the foundation of this development, but serves us only at the most basic level. Coaches, mentors, leaders and professionals must supplement this at every turn.

This growth eventually develops a confidence to accept mistakes as a natural extension of complex work. Therefore, how we react to mistakes is the second critical element. Mistakes, when not moral or legal, serve to strengthen our foundations. The challenge is being confident enough to admit the mistake and share not only the causal factors but the proposed solution. Likewise, we must be sufficiently enlightened to translate common factors to other areas and, in turn, receive inputs back. This is supremely difficult as it takes a wealth of experience and incredible patience to see likenesses between, say, how a failure to properly budget and a fratricide incident can be related. This is a cultural shift for many organizations, but one that can be accomplished by developing groups of catalysts or "creating a guiding coalition."

The target for this cultural change--the drumbeat of the guiding coalition and the third essential element--must be capturing, providing, documenting and sharing feedback in an open, constructive way. There are seemingly endless tools to accomplish this: 360-degree feedback, performance reports, AFSO21 events and even an Air Force school devoted to teaching and promulgating effective feedback. The difficultly lies in consistently accomplishing feedback and, ultimately, anchoring it to the culture.

Additionally, the effectiveness of feedback is directly proportional to the structure of the process in question, but it does help create structure where none existed previously. Furthermore, we often allow feedback to develop a negative connotation when understanding why "things went right" is equally important. Organizations that consistently target the mistake for feedback eventually grow weary of the feedback process, making it less useful. The feedback culture must view it as an opportunity to teach and learn: to prove there is a problem, to ask questions about it, and offer solutions.

Sadly, organizations stagnate in a reactive mode without professional enlightenment, sufficient intellectual capital or a culture of acceptance and feedback. When mistakes occur, those groups routinely seek to "add another step to the checklist" or create new processes rather than seek out and target root causes. These organizations rarely see the next issue but become skilled at fighting the crisis d'jour. Indeed, they often reward leaders for that behavior. Conversely, it is the proactive organization we should hold in awe. Their enlightened workforces seek out parallels from other areas and anticipate issues by modifying their cultures and behaviors. They could see how a tragic aircraft accident at Tenerife Airport is very similar to a failure to properly mark and process pallets at a shipping yard.